Colossal pyramids, imposing temples, golden treasures, enigmatic hieroglyphs, powerful pharaohs, strange gods, and mysterious mummies are features of Ancient Egyptian culture that have fascinated people over the millennia. The Bible refers to its gods, rulers, and pyramids. Neighboring cultures in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean wrote about its god-like kings and its seemingly endless supply of gold. The Greeks and Romans describe aspects of Egypt's culture and history.
As the 19th century began, the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt highlighted the wonders of this ancient land, and public interest soared. Not long after, Champollion deciphered Egypt's hieroglyphs and paved the way for other scholars to reveal that Egyptian texts dealt with medicine, dentistry, veterinary practices, mathematics, literature, and accounting, and many other topics. Then, early in the 20th century, Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun and its fabulous contents. Exhibitions of this treasure a few decades later resulted in the world's first blockbuster, and its revival in the 21st century has kept interest alive.
Join Dr. David Silverman, Professor of Egyptology at Penn, Curator in Charge of the Egyptian Section of the Penn Museum, and curator of the Tutankhamun exhibitions on a guided tour of the mysteries and wonders of this ancient land. He has developed this online course and set it in the galleries of the world famous Penn Museum. He uses many original Egyptian artifacts to illustrate his lectures as he guides students as they make their own discovery of this fascinating culture.
This course focused on five key areas in the study of Ancient Egypt: 1) Principles of Egyptian Art, 2) The Basics of the Language of Ancient Egypt: Hieroglyphs, 3) Egyptian Magic, 4) Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, and the Religion of the Aten, and 5) The Burial of Tutankhamun and the Search for his Tomb.
This course is intended to accompany, and ideally to follow, Introduction to Ancient Egypt (also available on Coursera).

Enseigné par

David P. Silverman

Eckley Brinton Coxe, Jr. Professor of Egyptology

Transcription

When we think about English and orientation, it's generally understood that we read from left to right. And that is with many of the modern languages but not all of them. Arabic and Hebrew, for example, work from right to left. So what happens in ancient Egypt? Well, because the signs are adaptable, you can actually write in any direction that you want. Let's start with the way that the Egyptians used most of the time. So they generally started from the right side over here and wrote in this direction. So, for example, they could have, this is the word for house, and this is the word for of, and this is the word for man. And so you might wonder, "Well, how do you know how to read them?" Well, you look at the human figures and any of the animal figures. So they are facing to the right, and therefore, you read from right to left. In other words, the human and animal figures are facing toward the beginning of the line, but the Egyptians could also work from this side as well. Hieroglyphs were very adaptable in this way. So all you had to do then is see, the bird is here. Let's just reverse the signs. They don't necessarily mean anything. But they face to this direction, so then you read in this direction. We can see in several different examples how this principle actually works. For example, in the tomb of Kapure, especially the false door, we can see in the upper parts where the text runs in the direction from right to left, but when we get to the palms, it actually goes from left to right on one side and right to left on the other. In some cases, we can see that the Egyptians were also writing in a variety of different ways on the same monument. For example, in some of the offering tables, which generally have this kind of shape, and we have one in the museum, and they're shaped generally like this. So the very often is a border here, and a border here, a border here, and a border here, and another one over here. So sometimes they will start over here and go in this direction to that midpoint. Sometimes they start over here. But, in this case, they start right in the middle, and then the text goes to be read in this direction, and then it goes down in this direction, but the figures are facing in this direction, so you read each particular line, and you go down from left to right. So it mixes all of that up, and then it goes in this direction and then in this direction. So we have it going down like this. It's a beautiful piece and one of the best of these offering tables that we have in the museum. But this type of thing with orientation, it just shows you how adaptable the Egyptian language was. But this isn't the case with all aspects of the ancient Egyptian language, because Egyptians also had a type of script writing like ours. So whereas we have both a printed and script version, the word happy, if we do it in script, it would be like this. The letters are connected. Here, they're not, and they've done a little bit differently in ancient Egyptian. We also have a script writing that we call hieratic. So what's the difference with that? Well, for example, if we have a sign like this which is called an olave, and it sounds sort of like oh, in the back of the throat, we'll get the pronunciation in a few minutes. If we were going to do this in hieroglyphs, we could also flip it in this direction. But you can't do that in hieratic. The hieratic signs that you see here that are written from right to left, those were used pretty much from the same period onward. That is the earliest periods, for more economic uses, for documentation, and eventually, for material on papyrus, whereas the hieroglyphs that you see over here, which seemed to be more adaptable, could be used on a variety of different surfaces.